How best to remove terrible paint job from interior rendered brick walls

[OneMansFool]

Hi folks. I recently bought an apartment in a 1970s brick block, w/ rendered brick interior walls in fairly shabby condition. It’s a fixer-upper. Every single wall is so badly textured that I thought it must have been the render itself:

Every single wall in the place looks like this…

But upon closer inspection, I think the real culprit is the 50 years of bad paint jobs:

But from what I can tell, the problem is entirely the paint, not the wall? Wall seems perfectly smooth under all that.

I have just had a read through a number of Paint Removal threads here, and they have been helpful. But if possible, I would like to get some advice specifically on my rendered brick walls — I am very unfamiliar with anything like this and am not sure what I should be expecting.

Am I right that removing the existing paint and starting again from the original smooth wall is the sensible way to go? Or will the original render be a bit too susceptible to damage as I am scraping the existing paint off? It is a generously-proportioned 3 bedroomer, so it will take me some time — but that’s OK, I have time. My main concern is just avoiding dumb decisions along the way.

Thanks!

[OneMansFool]

Plot Twist

Turns out under all of those bad paint jobs, the original layer is actually wallpaper.

After some trial and error (including using some wallpaper stripper), it seems easiest to remove the wallpaper in large pieces if I DON’T spray anything on and I DON’T remove the paint first. The paint seems to hold together the wallpaper pretty well, stops it from ripping into smaller fragments.

I’m leaving some minor (but widespread) damage to the wall as I go. They are reasonably shallow but I think I’ll need to fill them before painting. So I intend on using the Masonry Polyfilla for that.

I’m using metal paintscrapers to get the paper off. Is there perhaps a better tool I could be using? Or is a little damage to the wall just to be expected?

[MitchellMc]

Hi @OneMansFool,

It's great to hear back from you and to see that your project is progressing nicely. That Polyfilla you mentioned previously would be fine for filling holes, but what you need for smoothing that plaster off is a skim coat of topping compound over the entire wall. You'd apply it with a nice broad Spear & Jackson 330mm Plasterer Float. The idea is to apply a very thin coat of compound in a sweeping motion that fills all the voids. You'll have the best results if you skim coat the whole wall instead of trying to fill individual damage marks.

I'd suggest using a Rust-Oleum Wallpaper Paper Scraper as its unique design maintains the correct scraping angle, which avoids excessive damage to the wall. Alternatively, you might like to try a wider 200mm scraper. With any scraper, you need to hold it at a shallow 15-degree angle to avoid digging into the surface. When I'm using those Uni-Pro scrapers, I often sharpen them slightly as they come blunt.

Regardless of what method you use to remove the wallpaper, I'd expect some amount of damage that needs to be filled.

Please let me know if you have further questions.

Mitchell

[OneMansFool]

Brilliant, thanks!